In 2010 I began gardening at my house in Portland, Oregon. The site presents several challenges, mostly that it has partial sunlight and poor soil.Because I live in a duplex, the only available garden space is Western side of my house. It's difficult to garden in the city for many reasons, but for one, buildings can block sunlight. My house shades my garden in the morning. This means that I don't start getting sun on the garden until early afternoon. With an already short grow season in Portland, due to the overcast and rainy spring, it would be better to have my brow beds on the South side of my house. This would enable me to grow warm-weather crops, such as tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers much better because the sun would hit the plants all day long. With a cooler, damper garden, I also have had terrible slug problems. Slugs love to eat anything green, and because my garden has a cooler micro-climate, I often grow many greens, such as chard, spinach, kale and lettuce.
The other challenge at my house is soil quality. Both the front and side garden beds recently had large conifer trees removed. The soil that was left was highly damaged. It was mostly clay, with no organic matter building up on it for many years. The first summer I was shocked when the soil was rock-hard, which looked OK when it was wetter when I turned the beds over earlier that spring,
As a last-resort, because it was getting late in the season, I dug out trenches in the thick clay and put down a thick layer of dirt and compost. My plants grew, I got a harvest, but I could tell the soil was still lacking in many essential nutrients and it did not have a good soil ecosystem. I needed to add a lot of organic material and compost.
I started a compost pile for my house and my neighbors -- pictured on the right at the back of the garden behind the white fence posts. Making compost has been slow here because we do not have very much input. Our plot of land is so small and we do not produce too much food waste either. I have gotten good and finding good sources of organic material around the city. I have a hard time keeping up with "browns" in my compost to accompany all my food and garden waste, or "greens". ideal compost is one part green, two parts brown.
On the side-bed, I planted broccoli, sunflower, tomatoes, lettuce and leeks. As you can see, the soil was a clay-pan by midsummer. It was so hard. When I watered, the water did not sink into the ground, and the plants seemed stunted. I did get a surprisingly good broccoli harvest, and an OK tomato harvest. This soil was not quite as bad as the soil in the front bed, so I didn't dig out trenches. I did mix compost into the clay to try and break it up. The first winter, I covered the beds with leaves and straw as a sheet mulch to try and increase the organic content in the soil. In a healthy soil, good bacteria feed on organic material in the soil, breaking it down, and making it available to the plants. As a general rule of thumb, and organic material is good in a garden.
More to come on the 2011 and 2012 grow season.
